Freeze
by T. K. Ryder
Summary: Not all of us started the way we ended up. Some of us were forced there, by our circumstances. Some of us did it all for others. The story of Mr. Freeze.


**Mandatory Author Note: **_I own nothing. Nothing but the random researchers, so far. Eventually, maybe I'll own more, but you can never be sure about such things. Also, if you liked Freeze in the comics or something, I would not recommend reading this. I am _slowly_ becoming what would count as a big Batman fan, and I haven't read any comics with Freeze in them. I just like the idea of him, and wanted to try to create him how I want. Maybe before this is over, I'll read a good one with him in it, but it seems all the major Bats comics are about the Joker (Dark Knight Returns (Although that's also Superman and TwoFace and whatnot), The Killing Joke, The Man Who Laughs). Maybe Loeb or someone needs to get ahold of Freeze and revolutionize him. I would definitely appreciate that._

On the coast of Antarctica, where the shelf was all breaking off, now, there was a small buried base. A geodesic dome, built to survive anything and everything. It could have been a temple or a fortress, and it would survive. The strongest, most stable structures ever created by mankind, and one had been _unearthed_ in Antarctica. The researchers there didn't explore much of it, only the first labs, as the rest was far too frozen for exploration. They set up their temporary labs there, thinking they would only be there for a few weeks.

But there was another there. Another who needed new lab supplies. Another who has claimed this dome for himself long ago.

Victor watched them until they were preparing to load everything up and leave. They split up, then. There were five of them, and he first picked the one that was further away from the pack. He clubbed him over the head and dragged him off into some dark corner. The next man rounded the corner, calling out Steve's name.

Victor was upon him in an instant. But he wasn't fast enough. The man called out, and for that Victor tore out his tongue. The other three came upon the scene. They found one man knocked out in the corner, and another in the middle of the room with his tongue ripped out. They were understandably afraid, and Victor grinned. He could use that against them. Victor threw all the light switches, plunging them into darkness. He flipped the light above them back on, then off. One of them was holding a strange rifle. It was all silver, and quite futuristic looking. It had four tubes coming out of the barrel, back toward the holder. The man was wearing a small pack on his back, and every tube connected back to that. Where the barrel of the rifle should have been was instead what looked to be a sideways step pyramid, the spear point pointed outwards.

He took note of this. Before the group of scientists had a chance to react, Victor grabbed one by the throat and slammed his against his knee, knocking him cold and possibly killing him. There was a chaotic blue and black flash, as if the blue light from the rifle was arching through the darkness, but barely penetrating it. Victor was highly illuminated, but not hit. Victor quickly grabbed another man, the one without the rifle, and dragged him away. He was screaming, but his yells echoes all over the dome, so the rifle-man shot wildly, trying to find him. Victor dragged him several rooms away, into the freezing cold of the cryogenic chamber.

"Why are you here?" he asked, simply enough. His voice didn't sound right. It sounded like he needed to clear his throat, and he did.

"I-I…we're studying frogs!"

"Frogs?" No, that wasn't it. His voice just sounded old. When was the last time he had heard himself speak? It had to have been years ago, before Claudia had been frozen.

"Y-yes, frogs. We're studying how they freeze themselves at the cellular level, and stay alive in cold winters."

"Why would you want to study _that_?" But if it was years to him, how long had it been? He only stayed human for six months at a time. It took three years for him to be human one.

"I dunno, man! I'm not a scientist. I'm fuckin college student. I got lucky to get to come up here. Please, don't hurt me. I didn't do anything."

Victor stared at him in pure disgust. Weak. He could not admit to his faults. Victor would show him the _cost_ of his faults.

"You curse. You masquerade as a scientist. You are ignorant. This, you have done. And for that, you will be punished."

Before the man could respond, Victor broke both of his legs, and then broke one wrist, and threw him against a wall, knocking him cold. Too young, thought Victor. I'll let him live. He opened up the second cryogenic chamber and tossed the youth in. He wouldn't die in there, no, but he wouldn't get any better either.

Victor moved on to the last scientist. All the lights were back on, and the man had been waiting for him. Before he could respond, the blue and black arch from his rifle crashed into Victor's stomach. Blue and white veins shot up and down Victor's body, and an amazing cold overtook him. Once, he had stepped outside with close to nothing on, in a daze after his first stay in the cryotube, and regretted it. The cold was unbearable. This felt the same.

His entire body froze down to the cells, the liquid in them turning cold enough to stop dead but not freeze. His skin, however, _did_ freeze as ice. He heard laughter. It ended when he tore his eyes open. He had felt this before. It felt the same way it did when he first got out of the cryogenic tubes, each and every time. He snapped his arm down, feeling several layers of skin cracking and flaking off of his body. It had gone deep enough that he didn't bleed. He felt inhuman pain, though. He tempered with rage. The cold seemed to reenergize him. He felt strong, he felt manic.

The man was in so much shock that he didn't move before Victor's hand moved faster than he should have been able to, and grabbed the man's face. He knocked the rifle out of his hand with the other, and simply squeezed until the man dropped to his knees in pain.

"Who?"

"A guy called the Joker. Total psycho. But he had cash. Please, I'm sorry!"

Victor squeezed harder until blood was dripping out of the man's ears and he could hear his teeth crushing against each other.

"Where?"

"Gotham!"

Victor grinned. Gotham. He had heard all about the cities vile inhabitants. This Joker was his kind of man, to be studying something as important as cryogenics. And frogs.

"You have served your purpose."

With that, he crushed the man's skull in his hand. He twitched for a few moments, Victor watching in fascination, and then lay still. Victor took his rifle, tore the tubes out of the backpack.

"This will _not_ work," he thought aloud. "I'll need something much less obvious."

He glanced down at the rifle and noticed that his skin was pale white, even slightly on the blue side. That would be a problem. His rage was not slaked. He could feel it, like a monstrous beast bashing itself against a cage. He had let it out. It was pressed now, closer to the bars.

With a grin, Victor let it loose again. He found the last researcher that he had only stunned, and beat him to death with his fists. His strength was easily threefold. He could break bone and punch into soft flesh. He found that his hands were covered in blood, and none of his own, when he was done.

He walked into the cryogenic room and stared at Claudia's young, beautiful face. Everything he had to do was worth it; worth it, for her.

She was wearing a thin cryo-suit, skin tight, which was best for cryo-freezing, as it didn't freeze, and it provided increased protection over the more sensitive areas of the human body, to ensure that there was no permanent damage. Claudia was suspended in a pool liquid nitrogen mixed with several incredible rare chemicals that preserved her body. If he ever wanted to unfreeze her, it would take over a day. It took him nearly an hour to unfreeze each time he was in for a year, so it would take her much longer.

She was beautiful. Her hair had, of course, been shaved, but it had once been long and black and curly. He remembered it falling across her shoulders, and he couldn't stop himself from thinking it looked like a lion's mane. Her skin was pale white, now, and her lips were blue. So much of her outer beauty had been torn away by her disease, and further by her freezing, but he could still see it. It was clear and hazy to him, superimposed over her now sickly appearance.

The cryo-suit even had a name tag. "Mrs. Fries". He liked reading that. It made her seem almost like his property, having taken his name. It gave him a sense of power. It made him feel that they were the same. They were both Fries, and they both always would be. But he hated that it couldn't say her name. It didn't say Claudia Fries.

He noticed, when he broke his trance from her, that he felt much better, stronger, in here. It was over ten degrees colder in here. When he had been in the other room, murdering the last researcher, he had felt strong. But here, he felt nearly godlike. His energy had returned, and he could feel his mind running through ideas, ways to cure Claudia.

"I will save you," he swore to the floating woman. It was his mantra, his commandment. When things were going bad, when he was losing hope, he would remember. His promise. The last thing he had said to his wife.

He found his cyro-suit and glanced at it.

"Mr. Fries. Mr. Fries. Mr. Freeze," he said with a chuckle. "I like it."

He tore off the name tag and printed off a new one with the ancient typewriter. He slid the new slip of paper over the old and put it back on the cryo-suit. He grinned at his handiwork. He slipped the suit on, and hefted the rifle. It was probably heavy, but he couldn't tell, now. If he was able to put pads through the arms, that would provide him greater protection and he could conceal the tubes from the rifle.

"Why am I even thinking like this?"

He didn't know anymore. Maybe it was just that sense of power he had seen when he saw "Mrs. Fries". Maybe he had finally seen his chance, his opportunity, to save her. He stroked the glass so softly, and knew that it was all worth it; worth it, for her.

Victor Fries spent the next several hours modifying his suit. He build the tubes through the arms of the suit and to the back, and then broke open the pack that the researcher had been wearing. The mechanism seemed simply enough, but it would need to be reshaped. He spent two days doing that, and then went to test his theory about how temperature could affect his body.

He went to a different room and turned the thermostat up. As the temperature slowly increased, he slowly felt worse, and weaker. All his strength was gone at normal room temperature, and he felt dizzy. Once it reached eighty degrees, he could barely stand. At ninety, he had to crawl to the thermostat to turn the heat off. He found that no matter how far _down_ he turned the heat, there were no side effects. He reached his apparent physical maximum at four degrees below zero Celsius. His body _should_ have been dead at that point. The majority of the human body is water, and no water could still be liquid at four below Celsius. He tried not to worry that he was still alive, and just thought of it as an advantage.

He remembered that Gotham city had been around eighty the few times he had been there, so he would need to find a way to cool his body easily and quickly. After three days of wrestling with this problem, he realized that he hadn't slept. He had started keeping the entire dome at around five below, and he had apparently lost the need to sleep.

A miniature cryogenic chamber, just for himself. It would keep him at below seventy degrees, utilizing energy gained from moving any part of his body and cool him with that. It could store energy and he could charge it whenever he was near a wall outlet. It would use stored energy to cool below there. If he ever ran into trouble, it could cool to his thermal optimum in only three minutes. And, it wasn't very noticeable. If he needed to be immediately cooled, he could wear a glass shell over his head and cool down in seconds, floating in a liquid nitrogen bath, from temperatures higher than he could handle. He took out a calendar and counted the days that had passed since he had been so rudely awakened. It was nearing the end of summer, or the beginning of Autumn, depending on the area. He had hoped it would be closer to winter, but then realized that he woke up, every time, as close as he could to the middle of spring, as his old body couldn't survive an arctic winter.

One day, the people who had come to take the research team back arrived. He hid all the bodies, and they didn't search more of the dome than the others had, and eventually left. They weren't involved. They were just hired guns, who didn't mind, much, if they found the people or not. Unacceptable. Once they left, Mr. Freeze followed.

He wore his full suit, helmet and all, and carried his rifle, his "Freeze Gun". He laughed at the name as he fired it into the massive doors of the geodesic dome that he had spent so long building. They were frozen shut, Claudia safe inside. He wasn't certain how he would get back in, but he would find a way. He followed them back to their boats, and killed all but the captain. The captain was necessary, and he seemed to be less guilty than the rest of them.

Eventually he would reach it. Gotham. Gotham and the Joker.


End file.
